tribe: on homecoming and belonging
the book
Tribe by Sebastian Junger is 'a book about why men miss war', positing that society is the reason why veterans struggle upon returning from military duty.
The book makes a cogent argument that modern society is alienating and dispiriting and that military service blends hardship, camaraderie and a sense of group purpose that existed in premodern society.
This tribal feeling now only arises, according to Junger, during conflict, disaster or poverty. Without it, we become more and more individual and although we now strive for self actualisation, more and more unhappy without a shared common purpose.
It's a short, well-written book that can be knocked out pretty quickly while it has a perspective and line of reasoning that are both interesting and clearly elucidated. Having said that, if you're not into the topics then you could give this a miss. I am so I'm pleased I read it.
A could read.
Why I read the book
Although I'm not especially interested in the military, it makes for an amazing lens to look through at wider issues. I'm very interested in identity and was after a counterbalance to Trick Mirror, which looked at identity from more of a female perspective.
The transition from military service to civilian life is often correlated with the transition from an athletic career to a 'normal' one and I felt that there would be a fair bit to glean in this manner. Military units and sports teams share the intimate group environment, performance under stress and the sense of purpose that life outside these environments can lack. I'm interested in how to fill the void, partly for myself and partly for my work.
Tribe's given me some good material to link to other work - communicating online now seems to be the main way that we 'find our tribe' and allying this mass approach with Junger's argument in favour of close, in-person community is one of our great challenges.
Military service and combat on the other hand, is an odd mix of the best and worst time of someone's life. They feel useful and purposeful but see and do awful things. The difficulty comes in separating the two emotions from the experience, leaving them deeply mournful for the loss of their identity as a soldier while being haunted by some of their memories.
ideas and quotes
purpose
Without a sense of purpose, we're more at risk of mental health issues. In the West, you opt in to the military, choosing that as your identity, your thing, your service. Other may disagree with your service and whether it's necessary but for you, it's real and true.
Sport is another way of deciding meaning and purpose. It's a competition with scores and goals that you decide has a great meaning for you. If you play for a team, or choose to support one, you become part of a tribe with the same aims, goals and values, even if you may disagree on methods. In this way, sport unites people across socioeconomic backgrounds.
How do we prove our worth to each other? 'Sport is war minus the shooting', often using military language and gladiatorial feeling to evoke similar themes of sacrifice, courage and risk-taking. Sport can be dangerous but not like serving in a war. It draws on similar impulses within us but for the most part, it insulates us from real harm.
I wanted the chance to prove my worth to my community and my peers, but I lived in a time and a place where nothing dangerous ever really happened [...] How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?
Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
Societies have always had rituals and coming of age ceremonies from leaving a child in the woods overnight to passing out ceremonies like the modern prom. One is evidently more stressful and taxing than the other. Danger is something that Junger doesn't mourn the absence of in modern society, but it is something that he sees some value in. Who doesn't consider if they 'have what it takes' in an old school physical and psychological sense? This is why things like SAS Who Dares Wins and modern sport are popular. They're easy ways to see how we measure up.
Junger states that
Modern society obviously doesn’t conduct initiations on its young men, but many boys still do their best to demonstrate their readiness for manhood in all kinds of clumsy and dangerous ways.
Identity is one of my favourite topics and Junger’s depiction of leadership moving from a traditionally masculine 'move quickly and break stuff approach' to a softer, more emotionally intelligent one shows how the requirements for men in society are shifting and unclear in the modern age.
What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss.
individual vs collective
Junger argues that wealth and specifically personal property separates people and creates a fragmented society. If you win the game of wealth accumulation, you have a better life in many ways but it's a lonely one. This loneliness will be compounded by the structure of the modern city, with high rise apartments and a lack interpersonal interactions. If you lose, you may be richer in community and spirit but you'll find yourself struggling to remain afloat.
The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good.
A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day—or an entire life—mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.
The mechanism seems simple: poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses—and certainly isn’t the American ideal—but it’s much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence.
disaster creates common purpose
It turns out that conflict and disaster are cures for the mind - sociologist Emile Durkheim found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped. In areas affected by disaster, whether natural or human, there's plenty of evidence for it bringing people together, alleviating psychological issues and fostering a sense of togetherness that was previously absent.
plate tectonics under the town of Avezzano managed to re-create the communal conditions of our evolutionary past quite well. “An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain,” one of the survivors wrote. “The equality of all men.”
“When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose … with a resulting improvement in mental health,” Lyons, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 1979
Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others. As people come together to face an existential threat, Fritz found, class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group. It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.
trauma
The other side of military homecoming is PTSD and here Junger makes an interesting point about trauma by comparing veterans to rape victims. Rape victims endure extreme trauma but largely manage to overcome their trauma symptoms over time. The argument here is that it's treated by the mind as an overwhelmingly negative experience that is best moved on from or even jettisoned.
The exploration of trauma is one of Tribe's more interesting and potentially controversial digressions. I can see the sense in being able to psychologically compartmentalise clearly negative experiences and being unable to unentangle more nuanced ones so I see sense in his argument. Make your own mind up.
Rape is one of the most psychologically devastating things that can happen to a person [...] yet almost half of rape survivors experienced a significant decline in their trauma symptoms within weeks or months of their assault.
the trauma of combat is interwoven with other, positive experiences that become difficult to separate from the harm. “Treating combat veterans is different from treating rape victims, because rape victims don’t have this idea that some aspects of their experience are worth retaining,” I was told by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, the director of traumatic stress studies at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
“For most people in combat, their experiences range from the best of times to the worst of times. It’s the most important thing someone has ever done—especially since these people are so young when they go in—and it’s probably the first time they’ve ever been free, completely, of societal constraints. They’re going to miss being entrenched in this defining world.”
Killing seems to traumatize people regardless of the danger they’re in or the perceived righteousness of their cause. Pilots of unmanned drones, who watch their missiles kill human beings by remote camera, have been calculated to have the same PTSD rates as pilots who fly actual combat missions in war zones.
leadership
The move in leadership style from the type required in early, hunter gatherer style society where fast and authoritative decisions were made to a late stage version where group morale and emotional intelligence are more pressing.
Perhaps this could be referred to in different leadership environments. Sports teams need a sense of identity, a purpose and a clear plan to execute it to begin with. Then they need that group fostering, the young players need nurturing and the methods refining. It requires different styles and to be adapted for different personnel.
Think about the unicorn startup trajectory. You need a clear vision and goal and quick decisions, backed up by fast feedback loops. This can leave people feeling burned and miserable. Look at Uber where the leader Travis Kalanick was allowed to behave in aberrant ways while he served the company - later he was ousted when his methods no longer jived with the company's leadership needs as the business grew and matured.
early leaders tended to lack empathy and emotional control, that they were not concerned with the opinions of others, that they associated with only one or two other men in the group, and that their physical abilities far exceeded their verbal abilities. But all of these traits allowed them to take forceful, life-saving action where many other men might not.
Later stage leaders ‘were entirely focused on group morale’.
They were highly sensitive to people’s moods, they intellectualized things in order to meet group needs, they reassured the men who were starting to give up hope, and they worked hard to be accepted by the entire group.
Finally he closes the book with the story of a Mr Bauman, a business owner who had to ask his employees to accept a 10% salary reduction as the company was experiencing tough times. They accepted but he also, without telling them, forwent his own salary in total until he company was back on solid ground.
Bauman obviously felt that true leadership—the kind that lives depend on—may require powerful people to put themselves last, and that he was one of those people […] He clearly understood that belonging to society requires sacrifice, and that sacrifice gives back way more than it costs.
I’ll link to another article at the end about how to make pleasure in paying taxes, that sacrificing some of your own personal wealth and comfort can provide a small measure of joy in being able to provide the building blocks of civilisation for both yourself and others that may need the services that you subsidise.
society as antihuman
Whatever the technological advances of modern society—and they’re nearly miraculous—the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
“You’ll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society—that we are an antihuman society,” anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned
Junger makes an interesting point on criticism,
Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.
This neatly sums up modern discourse, where contempt is slung around with impunity whenever someone disagrees with someone else. They're instantly 'the worst'. It's such a stupid and reductive position to take as it precludes the possibility of learning from people outside your own moral framework.
If the human race is under threat in some way that we don’t yet understand, it will probably be at a community level that we either solve the problem or fail to. If the future of the planet depends on, say, rationing water, communities of neighbors will be able to enforce new rules far more effectively than even local government. It’s how we evolved to exist, and it obviously works.
Difference
Some of the quotes extol the virtue of emphasising why we’re the same. I’m interested in difference and believe that it gives us power, as discussed in the Trick Mirror piece. Difference gives us greater perspective, humility and eventually, humanity. In an antihuman society, perhaps wee need to focus on what makes us similar first to bring us together, then focus on our differences to understand one another.
As Junger says, difference is baked into us for a reason:
The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.
There’s a reason these things are so divisive but to deny the ‘other side’ has anything of any value to say is how we’ve arrived where we are now and ironically, why those who keep denying the legitimacy of another point of view will lose. I’ve recently become fascinated by Dominic Cummings and his approach towards driving political change - rather than take long held assumptions, he’s taken a tech style first principles approach to winning elections, focussing on swing voters with targeted adverts and leaving political rivals in the previous century with his methods, even was he drew on time tested principles of persuasion and psychology.
“If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?”
Related Ideas
Fight Club - explores the idea that modern men long for purpose, lack a spiritual outlet and desire to be physically, tested. Not too much of a stretch to see the parallels with the military or with organised sport.
Why Leave Won - Dominic Cummings explains how he managed to win a very tribal contest in the EU Referendum
The Undefended Leader - the theory that modern leadership now demands emotional intelligence and vulnerability rather than autocracy.